I've Been Learning Rust

Over the past several months I’ve slowly, but surely been learning Rust in my spare time. I started back in December by working my way through the first nine, or so, chapters of The Rust Programming Language (a.k.a. “The Rust Book”). After going that far I yearned to actually apply some of what I learned, and I did that primarily through contributions to rustfmt.

I’ve since resumed working my way through The Rust Book. It has been rewarding, and I’ve liked learning Rust. I’ve also enjoyed making contributions to the Rust Organization. In Redfin’s Spring Hackathon I managed to get a team together to work on a Rust project for a few days. That team discovered that embedding Rust inside C is pretty straightforward, which is really neat.

Today I was reading Chapter 14 of The Rust Book, which is about Cargo (Rust’s package manager). You can write documentation comments in Rust code that Cargo turns into HTML documentation for you. I’d sort of realized that from the very standard documentation across crates (the Rust term for packages). What I didn’t realize is that code snippets put into those documentation strings are verified when running cargo test. How many times have I wanted that to just be a thing in other work I’ve done?!